Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [8]
“Well, they wouldn’t have been buried in the cemetery because they weren’t Christians.” Mum pauses. “They were heathens.” I can tell from the way she says it that she likes that word—heathens—and its Somerset Maughamesque connotations. “But there’s a very nice little pet cemetery behind the house. I suppose it’s possible they’re buried there.”
“Buried with those snappy dogs,” I say.
“Oh,” Mum says, “I don’t know. It wouldn’t bother me.” And then her eyes go a threatening yellow. “You’re not going to put that in an Awful Book are you?” she says. “You’ll have Aborigines crawling from one end of the island to the other, digging the place up looking for ancestors.” Then she thinks about it. “Well, I suppose we don’t own the estate anymore, so it doesn’t matter.”
Waternish Estate was sold to a Dutchman in the 1960s when Bad-tempered Donald died. In turn, the Dutchman sold a part of the estate to the Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan. Donovan was the first of the British musicians to adopt the flower-power image. He is most famous for the psychedelically fabulous smash hits “Sunshine Superman,” “Season of the Witch” and “The Fat Angel,” and for being the first high-profile British pop star to be arrested for the possession of marijuana. Donovan has a history of being deeply groovy and of being most often confused with Bob Dylan, which reportedly annoys Donovan quite a lot.
“Sometime in the early seventies, Bob Dylan bought part of the estate,” Mum tells me. “But he put a water bed on the second floor of the house for whatever it is these hippies get up to, and it came crashing through the ceiling.”
“Not Bob Dylan,” I say. “Donovan.”
“Who?” Mum says.
THE ONLY LAND to which the Macdonalds of Waternish have any claim anymore are mounds in the graveyard of the ruined Trumpan Church near Waternish Estate. There are two small mounds with my grandparents in them and one larger mound containing a whole lot of my murderous, murdered ancestors. I drove toward the sea and found my grandparents’ graves. I stared down at them, wondering which one was my grandfather and which my grandmother. Mum was still trying to remember the dates to put on her parents’ headstones, and until then the graves were unmarked. “Isn’t it dreadful,” she says. “I just can’t think when they were born.” But this is how it has always been with our family. Whole lifetimes are reduced to one or two quixotic or iniquitous footnotes. When we were born and when we died are not important. After all, anyone can be born and die, but not everyone can Collect Aborigines or Begin a Breed of Dogs.
I turned and faced the Outer Hebrides. There, between me and the sea, was the mass grave of hundreds of my ancestors killed in one of the bloodiest episodes in Scottish history. So many died that a wall was pushed over the bodies in lieu of a proper burial and the battle became known as “The Spoiling of the Dyke.” It’s a story everyone in my family remembers, not because it was so brutal or because so many of our ancestors’ lives were lost (that happened with depressing regularity if you were a Macdonald of Clanranald), but because it involved a rape, two fatal fires and a severed breast—a lively accumulation of drama, even by our standards.
Around 1577, a Macdonald defiled a Macleod maiden, “Or did something to annoy her at any rate,” Mum says. In response—“a slight over-reaction in retrospect”—the MacLeods chased three hundred and ninety-five Macdonalds into St. Francis Cave on Eigg and lit a fire at the cave’s entrance. The trapped Macdonalds suffocated. Clanranald, chief of the Macdonalds, spent all winter and most of the following spring plotting a suitable counter-revenge. “Yes, well,” Mum says. “Highlanders aren’t really turn-the-other-cheek sort of people.” Accordingly, on the first Sunday in May 1578, Macdonald warriors, concealed by a thick fog, snuck up on Trumpan Church in which many of the MacLeods from nearby crofts had gathered for worship. The Macdonalds barred the church door and then set fire to the thatched roof.